Progressive Revelation...

[Thomas]

But Jewish Christians tended to believe that the Paraclete would appear in human form.

What Jewish Christians are we talking about? Just trying to get clarity on who and when ...

Really, whenever we discuss the Baha'i interpretation of Paraclete texts, we are still on the merry-go-round debate between Jewish Christians and Catholics that Islam resurrected . . .

I have no idea who you mean by 'Jewish Christians' and 'Catholics that Islam resurrected'? Are you talking of a particular timeframe, or historical moment?

 

[Ahanu]

But its us who make more of gender?

No. According to Johannes van Oort, Jerome also thought it was a mere question of language. But Johannes van Oort goes on to write about a Jewish Christian named Elchasai, who started a Jewish Christian sect I hinted at earlier when I mentioned Mani's Jewish Christian background:

"For the Jewish Christians themselves, however, it was not merely a question of language. Apart from the Gospel according to the Hebrews, this is testified by a number of testimonies regarding the prophet Elxai. This Jewish Christian prophet—in the various sources also named as Elchasai, Alchasaios, Elkesai and Elxaios—is said to have received the revelation written about in the Book of Elchasai in Mesopotamia in the year 116–117.

The church father Epiphanius (c. 315–430), for many years bishop of Salamis and the metropolitan of Cyprus, transmits this revelation as follows:

Next he describes Christ as a kind of power and also gives His dimensions (…)And the Holy Spirit is (said to be) like Christ, too, but She is a female being (thēleian) (…). (Epiphanius, Panarion 19, 4, 1–2 – Holl I, 1915:219)

Later on in his book, Epiphanius reports essentially the same:

And he [i.e., Elxai] supposed also that the Holy Spirit stands over against Him (i.e., Christ) in the shape of a female being (en eidei thēleian) (…). (Epiphanius, Panarion 30, 17, 6 – Holl I, 1915:375)"

The author concludes:

"It would be completely wrong to state that the image of the Holy Spirit as a woman and mother is simply caused by the fact that the Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac words for ‘spirit’ are (nearly) always feminine. Of course this was an important factor, but there were other significant factors as well, such as the link between the figures of the Holy Spirit and Wisdom or between Holy Spirit and the Jewish feminine concept of the Divine Presence or Shekinah."

Because the Christians believe Christ to be the Son of God, a revelation rejected by non-Christians.

I am not sure what you mean by "Christians believe Christ to be the Son of God." Let's not collapse that term (Son of God) into one meaning. What do you mean by Son of God? Perhaps you can elaborate. The Clementine Homilies, a Jewish Christian work, says the title is purely symbolic - a notion any Catholic would find heretical.

"And Simon [Paul?] answered: 'Does it not seem to you, then, that he who comes from God is God?' And Peter said: 'Tell us how this is possible; for we cannot affirm this, because we did not hear it from Him. In addition to this, it is the peculiarity of the Father not to have been begotten, but of the Son to have been begotten; but what is begotten cannot be compared with that which is unbegotten or self-begotten.'"

"And Peter said: “Why, do you not see that if the one happens to be self-begotten or unbegotten, they cannot be called the same; nor can it be asserted of him who has been begotten that he is of the same substance as he is who has begotten him?'"​

For these Jewish Christians, Jesus was "called by God His Son" "in the waters of baptism" (R 1.48). For them, the True Prophet is single, but has multiple manifestations . . .

What Jewish Christians are we talking about? Just trying to get clarity on who and when ...

See above for cited examples.

I have no idea who you mean by 'Jewish Christians' and 'Catholics that Islam resurrected'? Are you talking of a particular timeframe, or historical moment?

Authors of the Jewish Christian works I cited above as an example. We are still on that merry-go-round debate . . . that Islam resurrected, are we not? Historical moment? The appearance of the Prophet Muhammad. This person seems to be familiar with Jewish Christian communities . . .

 

[Ahanu]

Now let's jump into what Henry Corbin said when he linked Jewish Christian Christology with Islamic thinking. Pay attention to what he says about the Holy Spirit:

"The pattern of Ebionite Christology as contrasted with the official Christology of the Church is well known.30 Adoptianist like that of the Shepherd of Hermas, this Christology considers Jesus as having first been a man among men. It looks on the scene of the Baptism as the Epiphany: a supernatural light descended from heaven, illumining and transfiguring the place (as in the narrative of the Acts of Peter), and the words of the Holy Spirit were heard: "Thou art my beloved son, today I have engendered thee" (words which are echoed by those of Jesus recorded in the Gospel According to the Hebrews: "My mother the Holy Spirit seized me by the hair and carried me up to Mount Tabor").31 The consequences of this Christology are incommensurable: what interest now has the earthly genealogy of Jesus? Only Angelos Christos pre-exists, and all that need be meditated upon is his eternal birth in the pleroma. For beyond any doubt we find here a trace of the early hesitation to distinguish between Angelos Christos, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the repercussions of which may be found in all Islamic theology (in the identification between the Holy Spirit and Gabriel the Archangel, who in Christian Gnosis was also Gabriel-Christos). But we know that this recognition of Christos as an Angel (who confers not his essence or his 'person,' but his name and his quality upon Jesus) was bound up, among the Ebionites, as may be seen in I Enoch,32 with the idea of the Son of Man as originally a celestial Archangel and of Christos as one of the Archangels, at once prince of all the other Angels and celestial archetype of mankind.33 And we also find Christos as an Archangel among the Seven, or identified with the Archangel Michael (as in Hermas or among the Catharists), and this identification becomes all the more comprehensible.

In view of the contrast stated in one of the Clementine writings between the Demon us prince of the world and the Archangel Christ who will rule over the world to come.34 In all these variants, Angel Christology develops a soteriology that contrasts no less strongly with the orthodox soteriology. As the passage from the Acts of John regarding the mystery of the Cross of Light has solemnly told us, no soteriology attaches to the death of Jesus on the cross made of material wood. If he has been enthroned as a messianic Lord, it is not because his death effected a redemption; it is because the community was waiting for the Epiphany of the Son of Man, for Angelos Christos, the the return of him who dispenses the Knowledge that delivers and who will thereby establish a supraterrestrial kingdom, a kingdom of Angels.35 It is not by shedding his blood that he saved the world (Christus impatibilis does not die); he is the Saviour because he has kindled for mankind the torch of perfect Knowledge.36 The Clementine Homilies never speak of the Passion: redemption is effected by the Knowledge of the Truth. Jesus, the prophet of the Truth, is essentially an Illuminator, not a Redeemer in the Pauline sense. The traditional objection37—if Christ were an immortal Angel, he could not have become a true man and have suffered and died as a Saviour—always elicits the same reply: why should it have been necessary? And indeed this is a wholly Pauline objection. And although it is true that certain evangelical texts as well as the Apocrypha and certain Manichaean notions are known to Islamic theology and Ismailian Gnosis, there is no doubt that, like Mohammed himself, they know nothing of St. Paul.

We have suggested above that an ANGEL Christology goes hand in hand with an angel anthropology;38 the entire Adamology is affected, and the Ismailian vision concentrates on this theme. The dramaturgy embraces the events that befell the angelic, celestial Adam and the terrestrial Adam, or rather Adams. The traditional identification among the philosophers between Gabriel, the Holy Spirit, and the active Intelligence, which among the Ishraqiyun is the Angel of humanity and in Ismailism is Adam ruhani, or the Spiritual Adam, is only a commentary on the Koranic texts, where the identification Gabriel-Holy Spirit itself exemplifies a Gnostic Christology in which Angelos Christos assumes more particularly the features of Gabriel Christos. Here I shall briefly set forth a few points: they will serve us as an introduction to the dramaturgy that has its source in this angel archetype of mankind—a dramaturgy in which our own history today is simply a phase, the crucible of the metamorphoses which must either lead humanity back to its celestial and angelical origin or consummate its demoniacal fall.

The identification of Christos with the Archangel Gabriel is the dominant trait of an entire Gnostic Christology.39 If we consider at the same time the primitive identification between the Holy Spirit and the Son of God (the "magnificent Angel" of the Shepherd of Hermes), we shall understand the contention that it is the Holy Spirit itself that is sent to Mary, that inspires her with its own breath and "takes body" in her with a reality which is not that of a material body but of a subtle celestial body. Eo ipso, this equation (Gabriel-Christos-Holy Spirit) that is discernible in Angel Christology, becomes an aspect of what has been called "Spirit Christology" (Geisteschristologie). The great majority of the tafsir (Koran commentaries) are in agreement on this point (an entire book ought to be devoted to this pneumatology)."

 

[Thomas]

OK ... This thread started as a discussion of Progressive Revelation, and has moved far away from that, and as you say, this merry-go-round can go on and on. I think I've made my position clear.

As to the gender of the Holy Spirit: I know of no theological treatise proposing the gender of the Holy Spirit. As for the references above, they seem to be discussions of the Hebrew. Origen, for example, learned Hebrew to read the texts, but the comments referenced are actually his arguments against the gender-orientation of the Spirit.

As for Corbin — again you're talking a very individualist view.

The Greek Patristic view of the Holy Trinity avoids the question of gender because there is the inevitable fall into anthropomorphism. The Trinity is defined way beyond that, into an understanding of the ontology of being.

"The life of the Trinity has no need of outside participation. This must be stressed from the start. It is perfectly self-sufficient. There is something very essential in the fact that God is total fullness of being, and therefore exhausts totally within Himself the totality of what is, so that He needs nothing else. Otherwise he would not be God. There would be an imperfection in Him. And one of the things that we must seek tranquilly to understand in God is this fullness, this total perfection and self-sufficiency. Here is something in which our spirits and our hearts can rest and take comfort, for we ourselves suffer cruelly from the limitations, failings and imperfections all around us. (pp. 51-2)"
Jean Danielou, God’s Life in Us.

"... when we speak of the Holy Trinity we must always see its mission as an extension of eternal relations. All things are first accomplished in God. The Trinity is the expression of God’s life in its perfect self-sufficiency. The mission is a sort of radiation or reflection in the created world of what is first accomplished perfectly and wholly in God Himself."
Ibid.